Thornton bares it all in return to director's chair Scott Bowles

You remember Billy Bob Thornton of years gone by, the rude, crude Arkansan who was public in his scorn for the press and in his love for his wife, which he symbolized by wearing a necklace containing her blood?

Thornton, who returns to the screen in two films in the next few weeks, would like you to know he's the same guy. Minus the plasma.

"My life is pretty much the way it's always been, except I'm not in a celebrity relationship," Thornton says of his 2003 divorce from Angelina Jolie, who would later couple with Brad Pitt. "And I feel pretty good about that. I don't miss it."

Nor, he says, does he miss the scrutiny that came with that three-year marriage, in which he and Jolie made headlines for wearing DNA-dappled pendants — the press called them vials of hemoglobin, while Thornton said they were lockets containing a drop of each other's blood.

Either way, Thornton says, he feels a certain freedom from the flashbulbs since the split from Jolie, who was his fifth wife. He has moved into the more secluded environs of Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley, where he lives with makeup artist Connie Angland and has a 9-year-old daughter, Bella.

And he's directing his first feature film in more than a decade, the dark comedy Jayne Mansfield's Car, which opens in theaters Friday.